Underwater Attack (DS) review

"As is usually the case when taking down entire world-conquering governments, the task falls to a single person piloting a prototype fighter who’s expected to defeat a globe-spanning military without a sniff of support. Underwater Attack‘s big gimmick is that, instead of the solitary fighter craft taking to the skies, you instead pilot a lonely submarine through the surprisingly un-murky depths. A submarine shaped like a cartoon shark."

I’d not held out a huge amount of hope that Underwater Attack would finally be that PAL-only release to rub in the face of Johnny Foreigner and his collection of never-to-be-released-in-the-EU games. Set against the serious post-apocalyptic backdrop of a world flooded by melted polar icecaps, a diabolical empire has risen to enslave the now damp populous. As overly evil regimes are wont to do, their first order of business was to fashion the most cliché title possible. They called themselves the Chaos Empire. Because Evil has no flair for names.

As is usually the case when taking down entire world-conquering governments, the task falls to a single person piloting a prototype fighter who’s expected to defeat a globe-spanning military without a sniff of support. Underwater Attack‘s big gimmick is that, instead of the solitary fighter craft taking to the skies, you instead pilot a lonely submarine through the surprisingly un-murky depths. A submarine shaped like a cartoon shark.

The shark’s job is to wind its way through twenty stages of hostiles shaped like other sealife, such as suicidal clown fish or suicidal biggersharks or less suicidal chubbysharks that sometimes fire a missile that’s sometimes heat seeking if it feels like being so. Most of the targets you come across show very little in the way of competence, either hanging around the sides of the screen for a bit before charging recklessly at you, or hanging around the side of the screen contently until you explode them. Those of you expecting an enemy with the aggressive properties attributed to past French military campaigns to be a pushover will find themselves sadly disappointed. Your biggest hindrance is how the game makes you target the things you want to shoot.

Your sub happily swims around with nary a nudge of the D-pad, but your 360° rotating cannon is activated solely by stylus prodding. A crosshair sits onscreen, waiting to be guided, and any stream of offence offered is done so by nudging the marker wherever you want to shoot. This leads to two main problems:

1/ Even on the briefest of play-throughs, the amount of time spent holding stylus to screen quickly becomes uncomfortable at best, and bloody painful at worst.

2/ It’s a little hard to avoid the constant kamikazeing of 90% of the on-screen enemies when you’re always having to peer around your wrist to see what’s happening.

Targets have no problem flooding the screen from every angle and, in your haste to blow them up, you’re forced to constantly obscure large portions of the screen. Armed with this handicap, a game that should casually lounge on the easy side is instead turned into aggravating slog as you absorb unfair hit after unfair hit -- strikes against you that a toddler should be able to avoid with ease.

It’s enough to bury the otherwise interesting but sparse boss encounters or the ability to use your score between missions as currency to buy sub upgrades like missiles or to make your craft more resilient to incoming fire. Underwater Attack‘s primary goal was to make a cutesy shooter and one with a relevant gimmick for the DS, but it’s in the effort to tick the box for the second achievement that it damned both goals to abject failure.

I’ll just have to keep waiting for my gloat-worthy PAL-only release. The rest of the world can continue to look smug for now.

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